LA DISCOGRAPHIE DU ROCK FRANÇAIS

PAR FRANCIS GROSSE ET BERNARD GUEFFIER

Jean-Yves LABAT, keyboardist in Todd RUNDGREN's group, recorded an album on which he offers a music built around the possibilities and the sonorities of the synthesizers. He presents different musical styles such as electronic disco, new floating rock, exotic rock and a melodic and rhythmic music like VANGELIS.

The singer and multi-instrumentalist (keyboards, sax, flute), Richard LABLE offers a delicate and sensitive music in the same vein as Richard GILLY's first productions or ILOUS. His music is full of fine melodies, sung by a soft and gentle voice, and perfectly enhanced by excellent musi cians amongst which his brother Denys on guitar, and Teddy LASRY as a guest, on sax and keyboards.

Drummer Gilbert ARTMAN's group cut three albums: one with a strange, anguished atmosphere, the second with a HELDON-style sound and the third musically close to ARTMAN's other line-up, URBAN SAX, with its pronounced taste for arid, oppressive and industrial music. LARD FREE's music, like that of HELDON, is city music full of anguish, tension, inhumanity and electric fever.

This is an excellent progressive rock group whose works and musical direction evoke the Swiss group CIRCUS by this subtle mixture of influences (VDGG, YES, GENTLE GIANT) integrated with its own musical personality. The group performs complicated, perfectly constructed and developed compositions, with an emphasis on the sophistication of the arrangements, the quality of the vocals and the beauty of instrumental parts which are dominated by the group pianist and keyboardist's very fine style. The singer's tortured, expressive and suggestive singing evokes Peter HAMMILL and accentuates the lyricism of the group's music which is particularly contrasted, powerful and full of imagery.

The former MAGMA flutist is following a solo career centred on a research into melodies and music which likens him to VANGELIS or Mike OLFIELD: same fondness for light, ethereal and rich music, same desire to play on the notes and sounds of different instruments, same inclination to create an impressionistic and suggestive atmosphere. However, Teddy LASRY differs from these two musicians by a pronounced liking for a more swinging, warm music. An accomplished musician who works alone away from the beaten track.

Composers, musicians and creators of strange, completely acoustic instruments, they use voice or percussion instruments as generators for an amplified sound or for a complex vibrating structure which gives a pure and unique sound to their music.

Combining the influences of classical music, jazz, folk and rock, this trio, made up of D. LARGE (guitar), D. BARBIER (flute, harp) and J.C CAMORS (violin, vocals), plays a new lyrical, refined and original chamber music in the same vein as Paul WINTER, DO'A or OREGON. Like those groups, LBC expresses a great instrumental virtuosity and a deep originality through the complexity and delicacy of the compositions, by the onomatopeias sung of J.C CAMORS and by the exquisite melodic forms developed by their instruments. A warm music with an extreme refinement.

Cyril LEFEBVRE, former member of MAHJUN, tries out many different musical styles on his solo albums, playing antagonistic and cosmopolitan musics such as folk, blues, ragtime, classical music and rock and giving very original and personal interpretations from these musics. Sometimes, he turns towards to a musical way close to ETRON FOU sharing with this group the same liking for derision, satire and musical pastiche.

Those two musicians offer an acoustic repetitive music created solely by the flooding and entanglement of the notes from both their guitars, developing a music of sound loops in the same vein as Terry RILEY, but simply acoustic.

This guitarist, accompanied by many renowned musicians (KAJDAN, BLANCHARD, ENGEL...) offers a varied music; he sometimes turns towards to an energetic, powerful and very professional jazz-rock, or sometimes plays an original jazz-rock, alternating elegant electric passages with delicate acoustic pieces in the same vein as some tracks on the album "End of August" of Philip CATHERINE. Sometimes, he creates a new refined and lyrical chamber music.

This group whose leader is the singer/composer Jean-Yves LIEVAUX offers a music halfway between French progressive rock (ATOLL) and English progressive rock (YES, KC), jazz-rock and the new French songs (CHRISTOPHE, THIEFAINE) with some influences from MARCOEUR's surrealistic and burlesque rock. The songs, with delirious and accusatory lyrics, evoke reality and the everyday human condition and are enhanced by a sophisticated music with complicated and exquisite arrangements.

After being a famous musician in the jazz-rock group COINCIDENCE in the second half of the seventies, J.P LLABLADOR is now playing his own music and offers a jazz in the pure tradition of Jim HALL, Jimmy RANEY and Joe DORIO, who was his teacher and who speaks most favourably of him now.

Many well known musicians emerged from that group (Luc LE MASNE, Geneviève CABANNES...) but they never really succeeded in assimilating all their influences, from jazz to contemporary and traditional music.

This prodigious jazz-rock violonist, of the same international status as Jean-Luc PONTY for example, has asserted himself as one of the best representatives of jazz-rock in France and abroad. He is fond of rapid rhythms and sustained tempos into which he introduces frenzied and frantic solos but he is also capable of composing short, nostalgic, elegant pieces during which his violin becomes lyrical and delicate.

After having been a member of several rock groups he has became his younger brother Didier's appointed accompanist but has also recorded two albums under his own "first name". The first one offers a clear, straightforward jazz-rock evocative of RTF, occasionally tinged with a little exoticism but lacking in character. The second album offers a much more intimist, jazzy music which gives full scope to the expression of his lyrical piano playing.

This group is composed of ex-GERMAIN HUBERT ALLES and ex-HELLEBORE musicians along with many friends from different horizons such as DEBILE MENTHOL or OFFICER. On its first album, the group offers a very varied music full of all kinds of ideas and inspiration, and where the styles successivly remind us of ZNR, the RESIDENTS or VIDEO AVENTURES.

This duo, composed of a keyboardist and a guitarist, offers a splendid, original, suggestive and elegant progressive music tinged with grandeur and delicacy. The keyboards use the solemn register and the majestic tone of the great organs and create magnificent and complicated melodic and instrumental structures on which the guitarist creates and develops frenetic and agressive guitar parts which break and dispel the fantastic and delicate atmospheres developed by the keyboards. This duo produces a music in the same vein as FUHRS and FROHLING or EDEN, with a more pronounced tendency to create strange and unreal climates. Excellent and original.

After having been a member of TRIANGLE and founder of EDITION SPECIALE with which he made three albums, Mimi LORENZINI resurfarces to make a record with his partner from EDITION SPECIALE, Ann BALLESTER who plays the keyboards on this album which features a lyrical, serene music.

This keyboardist has had an eventful musical career because, after having played with industrial music groups and appeared on stage with "new wave" groups, he recorded an album of rather original electronic music, slightly influenced by the "new wave" trend. It differed from this trend by a certain melodic creativity and musical sophistication whose qualities remind us of Bo HANSSON's music, though hightly duller.